no no it's not a philosophy you misunderstand, it's a mentality. You cant sit around and wait for topics/ideas to become testable in the future and then test them. With this mentality, you are required to move onto other topics of research, so you are not wasting time and money in the process.

i believe that if someone has the will to do something then they can do it... Just like the creator of the ford. He said that he wanted to make the first V-8 and all of his engineers said that it wasn't possible. So they wanted to quit but Ford told them that they either worked on the problem and that problem alone until they find a , which eventually they did. So now the Ford company is one of the best selling V8's in the US.

If something in nature is untestable, and "science" cannot therefore be applied, then is it worth considering with scientific method?

Well,... there's no way in proverbial hell that any technology or methodology now or in the forseeable future could test string theory,... yet how many researchers have been working on it? How much budget money has been devoted to it? Why is it still one of the most popular areas for promising young physicists to go into?

Clearly somebody thinks it is worth it.

Are there equivalents in ecology? I don't know. UNLESS... we consider the claims of string theory as the fundamental basis of all developments in ecology (i.e., micro-level sub-sub-atomic processes orchestrating predictable macroscopic behavior).